So don’t think that this is “The moment the New York Times turns.” It’s not. This is a marriage between Obama and the media and it’s too wonderful a marriage to toss away just because the media caught Obama hanging out late at night with Warrants of Ill Repute.

It’s a pantomime, it’s a show. They want Obama to call him to his offices and personally — off the record — assure them they’re still his One and Only, and of course he’ll do just that.

But for now, we can hear a bit of the lover’s spat through the thin wall to the adjoining apartment. Let’s turn up the music because we’ll hear giggling and lover’s cooing soon enough again.

Those reassurances [about self-restraint in the use of expansive spying powers] have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability. The administration has now lost all credibility. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it…

Mr. Obama clearly had no intention of revealing this eavesdropping, just as he would not have acknowledged the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, had it not been reported in the press. Even then, it took him more than a year and a half to acknowledge the killing, and he is still keeping secret the protocol by which he makes such decisions.

….

It is the very sort of thing against which Mr. Obama once railed, when he said in 2007 that the Bush administration’s surveillance policy “puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.”